Miss Towell lowered her eyes, and spoke with modesty. “I suppose you were visiting people who knew—who knew the person who—who gave you my address and the thimble?”
This question being more direct than she cared for Letty was careful to answer no more than, “Yes.”
Miss Towell continued to sit with eyes downcast, and as if musing. Two or three minutes went by before she said, softly: “How is he?”
Letty replied that he was very well, and in the same place where he had been so long. Another interval of musing was followed by the simple statement: “We differed about religion.”
This remark had no modifying effect on Letty’s estimate of Miss Towell’s character, since religion was little more to her than a word. Neither was she interested in dead romance between Steptoe and Miss Towell, all romance being summed up in her prince. That flame burned with a pure and single purpose to wed him to the princess with whom he was in love, while the little mermaid became first foam, and then a spirit of the air. It took little from the poetry of this dissolution that it could be achieved only by trundling over Brooklyn Bridge, and through a nexus of dreary streets. In Letty’s outlook on her mission the end glorified the means, however shady or degraded.
It was precisely this spirit—mistaken, if you choose 299 to call it so—which animated Judith of Bethulia, Monna Vanna, and Boule de Suif. Letty didn’t class herself with these heroines; she only felt as they did, that there was something to be done. On that something a man’s happiness depended; on it another woman’s happiness depended too; on it her own happiness depended, since if it wasn’t done she would feel herself a clog to be cursed. To be cursed by the prince would mean anguish far more terrible than any punishment society could mete out to her.
“If you feel equal to it we might go now, dear,” Miss Towell suggested, on waking from her dreams of what might have been. “I wish I could take you in a taxi; but I daresay you won’t mind the tram.”
Letty rose briskly. “No, I shan’t mind it at all.” She looked Miss Towell significantly in the eyes, hoping that her words would carry all the meaning she was putting into them. “I shan’t mind—anything you want me to do, no matter what.”
Miss Towell smiled, sweetly. “Thank you, dear. That’ll be very nice. I shan’t ask you to do much, because it’s your problem, you know, and you must work it out. I’ll stand by; but standing by is about all we can do for each other, when problems have to be faced. Don’t you think it is?”
As this language meant nothing to Letty, she thanked the nurse, smiled at the other patients, and, trudging at Miss Towell’s side with her quaintly sturdy grace, went forth to her great sacrifice.